


that sleep of death

by trash_rendar



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Order 66, Post-Order 66, dreams are fucky and also angsty, i heard y'all like Jedi Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-07-14 02:15:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16030892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trash_rendar/pseuds/trash_rendar
Summary: On her worst nights, after the Great Purge, Ahsoka Tano has a nightmare.





	that sleep of death

On her worst nights, after the Great Purge, Ahsoka Tano has a nightmare.

 

The dream goes like this:

 

Plo Koon- master of the Jedi Order, general of the Grand Republic Army, veteran of innumerable battles of the Clone Wars- is fighting to breathe.

 

Ahsoka observes from both outside and within the cockpit. The nature of this dream gives her a kind of separated omniscience; all-seeing, all-knowing, but always chained by the inability to act. She can watch the scene before her unfold, like a holodrama, but she can’t control its outcome. Or the fate of the man inside, the closest thing to a father she can remember. (In that respect, at least, the dream is much like being awake.)

 

Master Plo’s Delta-7 has erupted in fire. His head rings with a concussion that’s echoed by the aching elsewhere in his body, still suffering from being thrown around his cockpit like a ragdoll. Blood trickles from a cut above his brow, dribbling down the side of his face and staining his robed collar and shoulder.

 

But worst of all is the pain he feels through the Force; it had begun in his heart and his mind only moments ago, cruising over the subjugated Neimoidian bridge-cities, so sudden and shocking that it had blinded him to the treachery of his clone wingmen until too late. And now it howls at him, louder than a turbolaser, the sum of thousands of voices crying out in pain and fear. It’s a cold and hollow kind of anguish, and it plays fitting counterpoint to the burning starfighter he’s trapped inside.

 

Somewhere- everywhere- something terrible has happened. _Is_ happening. The sheer scale of it almost swallows Plo Koon whole. But he forces himself to his senses, setting aside the pain and agony like a Jedi master should- if he surrenders to it now, it will be the end of him. It’s a small victory- one of the soul, of the spirit. The most important kind of victory for a Jedi.

 

But the fire still burns.

 

He tastes acrid smoke with every breath; it burns his tongue and stings his eyes. Had his mask ruptured in the crash? Plo’s fingers fumble with its casing, searching for cracks through which poisonous oxygen could seep, poisoning him with the air other species find so precious. It’s hard to tell, in the chaos of his cockpit, if he can find what he’s groping for.

 

It also adds an extra layer to an already precarious situation; if the conflagration in the cockpit doesn’t kill him, the atmosphere outside very well might- a short-lived escape, indeed. But another coughing fit seems to convince him it’s worth the risk, and Ahsoka is privately grateful that she won’t watch her Master Plo burn helplessly to death.

 

Still disoriented from the crash, he tucks his face into the elbow of one arm and pushes against the canopy with his other hand. His palm hisses against the superheated transparisteel bubble, turns its orange skin an angry red, but refuses to budge. The hinges, she intuits, must have fused solid when the ship caught fire. Plo realizes it too, tries the ejection system, pounds uselessly against the fighter’s instrumentation with the heel of his hand; it, too, has failed.

 

His lightsaber is wedged between his thigh and the cockpit wall; the clip that kept it securely on his belt is sundered, useless bits of metal flung across his lap. She wants to point down into the cockpit and scream _It’s there, it’s there!_ \- but of course, she can’t. He finds it anyway, aiming the hilt skyward and thumbing the ignition stud- but instead of an aqua-colored energy blade, only sparks spurt out of the emitter. The crash, or the heat, has fouled its circuitry.

 

 _This weapon is your life,_ she hears from somewhere far away. The implication puts a lump in her throat.

 

Plo Koon’s heart pounds, and Ahsoka’s along with it. He’s fast running out of options- and time. He closes his eyes and slows his breathing, reaching out with the Force; she watches, torn between dread and hope. Had he possessed the talent of Master Windu, he could have simply shattered the canopy at its weakest point, but instead, he needles the explosive bolts sitting under its frame. If he can detonate the bolts before the flames consume him--

 

One by one the charges go off- _pop, pop, pop-pop_ \- loosening the transparent hood just enough that air from outside seeps into the cockpit, whipping the fire within into a fierce inferno. It’s all he can manage, but it’s just enough.

 

He has to bundle into his robes and curl up awkwardly in his seat before he can kick the the transparent hood away; he strikes it with his booted heel once, twice, three times before it bursts free. Then, without a moment to spare, he sets his feet, coils the Force beneath him and _jumps_.

 

The blaze at last touches off the fuel line, and the interceptor’s reactor breached; the explosion tore the fighter’s distinctive arrowhead fuselage into charred scrap. Plo Koon briefly feels a wave of heat and flame lick at his feet as he careens through the air and lands on a neighboring thoroughfare. It’s a blind jump, and it ends in a clumsy landing; his ankles caved out from under him as he tumbled to the ground and rolled to a stop. He rises on hands and knees, doubled over, and coughs and retches until the smoke has left his lungs.

 

He realizes then that the shoulder of his cloak is still slightly aflame. Plo pats out the embers as the sundered dome of his astromech lands with a grimly ironic clatter beside him. It’s not exactly the miraculous escape Ahsoka had privately hoped for. True, he is still alive, by some miracle- but he’s also injured, perhaps more seriously than either of them realize, and most of his equipment destroyed or inoperable. The clones are no longer his allies- and the Separatists that surely still lurk on their purse-world are certainly not his friends.

 

And the Force--

 

His lightsaber tumbles from his fingers as he clutches at his chest. He hears a wail that never ends- it only keeps rising in pitch and intensity. And with every murdered Jedi, a new voice joins the choir. (Ahsoka knows their song; she heard it first on Mandalore, still hears it, sometimes.)

 

The Force screams, _screams_ in his ears- and then it stops. Something inside him _snaps_ , like a rubber band stretched too far. Suddenly, he can think again.

 

His taloned fingers ball into fists against the ground. There’s no time for doubt. The Jedi Order needs him, and the galaxy needs however many of them are left. If the Light had been extinguished (as nightmarish and impossible as it’d seemed, at the time), it fell to the survivors to preserve its teachings- and each other.

 

He takes up his lightsaber again and rose on wobbly legs. The Code rings in his ears, and hers, with every twinge of pain and every thought of the faces they will never see again- _there is no death, there is the Force_. In the past, it had been reassuring. Now it brings cold comfort.

 

The air rings with the whine of an ARC-170- his attempted murderers, perhaps, returning to make sure the deed is done. And if they see him out in the open, hobbled yet alive, there was little doubt in Ahsoka’s mind that they will finish what they had started (good soldiers follow orders), and from the way Master Plo scans the sky she knows he’s thinking the same.

 

It’s time to disappear.

 

Plo Koon sets off at a trot towards the nearest cluster of buildings, pulling his scorched hood up over his head. He passes by her, both of them there-yet-not, and she feels the familiar, comforting ripple within the Force that only a living, breathing Jedi master can make. The cold, iron bands of dread around her heart start to loosen as she watches him leave. They’ll let the galaxy believe Master Plo Koon had died there, in the fiery wreck of his ship. But both of them will know better, even if one of them isn’t really there.

 

_There is no death. There is the Force._

 

Only that’s a lie. Like the lie she wants the galaxy to believe, within the dream. Like the dream itself. Because Plo Koon is dead, and he died on Cato Neimoidia. And nothing will bring him back.

 

So it’s cruel that the dream ends here, with Plo Koon surviving by the skin of his teeth, fleeing to safety and hermitage somewhere beneath the notice of the Sith. Riding off into the twin sunset, just like a holodrama. Because right about here is when the little seed of hope that the dream has been cultivating in Ahsoka’s heart begins to sprout- just in time to die as she passes back into the waking world, where the Jedi are dead and the Empire reigns supreme, and all hope rests in trusting that the spark that will burn it down will come soon, if it comes at all.

 

It’s cruel that her vision in the dream is so real, she almost wants to believe- in spite of all the other soul-crushing injustice it leaves in place for the galaxy- that it is. That one thing she held precious, in spite of everything, is somehow still intact. It’s not, and she knows it isn’t- except here, it is. And she could live in this moment forever, believe in it, if she hadn’t already come to the end of her time.

 

This is Ahsoka’s dream. But it isn’t Ahsoka’s nightmare.

 

The nightmare is what she has to face when she wakes up.


End file.
